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stop!

1) Tell me what you are trying to accomplish and how you are going about doing it.

2) A noticed a few more things that might be giving you trouble.

a) I don't know if you gave me your whole stylesheet, but you are only declaring the HOVER style. That means that your text will only change when you mouseover it.

b) You have two styles with the same name. You are calling both of the ones you posted "sidebar". That could be causing your problem. Each style needs to have a unique name or id. If you make the name descriptive it will help you at a later date.

c) if you want to style a hyperlink, then you need to use the a:hover method. That is the most reliable and indeed the "right" way to do it.

d) In your .sidebar style, you tell the font-weight and the font-style to be "normal". You don't need to do that as "normal" is the default.

If you want to style any other piece of text or element, then any other HTML tag can be used. As I said before, the reason why I use SPAN is because SPAN has NO attributes of it's own. That means that you can do anything you want to with it without worrying about any inherent styles.

So, answer the two questions I asked you at the top and we can start off from scratch OK? I want to help you, but I jumped into the middle instead of finding out the problem.

First of all, all my sites use these styles and they all work fine so obviously it shouldn't be that bad.

Secondly, you need a regular state, a hover state, a vlink and an active state in order to get both NS and IE to get it all right...if you miss one state NS will freak out especially if you have any transformation.

Here is one example used on one of my sites and again, it works in both NS6 and IE5.x:

So, where are the mistakes if it works on my sites? What I am trying to achieve was in my first post in this thread, which is *try* to use the CSS in a <div> or a <span> or a <td> tag or whatever tag I want to use it with. I have an external css file for all sites and pages, that way you don't have 100 lines of code in each pages by trying to save some space by not having any <font tags>.

I just find that so many sites have all the css perfectly rendered in IE and if you load it up in NS 4.x or 6.x it is simply awful or incompatible...I just want my visitors to see it as closely as possible of what I see in IE.

...that's why I love these forums! This one thread showed me how to do exactly what I came here to ask how to do. I needed to establish two different sets of <A> anchor types with completely different attributes.